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PGP Privacy Comes To VoIP |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Friday, 24 March 2006 |
Phil Zimmermann became famous for bringing privacy to the masses through the creation of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for encrypting e-mail’s.
Now he’s turned his hand to securing the equivalent of email in the 21st Century – VoIP.
Zfone is Zimmermann's take on a VoIP encryption protocol and he’s just presented it for peer review to the security community. Windows users will have to wait a few weeks to get their hands on Zfone, but the initial release covers Mac and Linux users.
Unlike other secure encryption systems which rely on the trading of certificates issued by a server system, Zfone's encryption protocol uses no keys. Or rather the necessary keys are created by the hardware and destroyed after the end of the call.
Apart from being more secure because there are no traces left on intermediary servers, this system is designed to make it simple and easy for less technical people to deal with.
One possible snag could be that the Zfone encryption protocol needs to be integrated into the hardware or software of a VoIP device. Not so, the system can be configured to work independently or be integrated applications and devices.
The system has sort of been under development for a decade. Zimmerman first looked at VoIP security back in 1996. PGPfone, as it was known then never really had much relevance because the broadband infrastructure was so immature back then that VoIP really didn‘t gain much market acceptance until recently. As a consequence the project was put on the back burner.
Although Zfone is already available as a free download, it could be up to a year before it is ready for widespread deployment. The availability now is meant to assist in the peer review process prior to the encryption scheme being integrated into VoIP products.
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